1/29/2009 @ 6:40PM

Oh, Henry

Henry VIII is best known for lopping off heads, marrying six times and expanding his gut. But his legacy, insists antiquarian-book collector and Tudor enthusiast Arthur Schwarz, runs much deeper. An accomplished theologian and sportsman, Henry wrote poetry and music and displayed a keen interest in astronomy and maps. Perhaps most important in Schwarz’s view, Henry VIII broke from Rome and established the Church of England, laying the ground for an expansion of British power.

Schwarz, 73, a retired U.S. bond trader, has turned a three-decade-long obsession with British history into an exhibit that illuminates the complex contributions of England’s most famous king. “Vivat Rex! Commemorating the 500th Anniversary of the Accession of Henry VIII,” curated by Schwarz, opens Mar. 4 at the Grolier Club, a society for bibliophiles in midtown Manhattan. The show of 140 books, manuscripts, handwritten letters and prints runs until May, then reopens for a three-month run at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. late in 2010.

Henry fanatics have other things to intrigue them these days: the bodice-and-doublet-ripping Showtime TV series, The Tudors, heading into its third season in April, and the movie and bestselling book, The Other Boleyn Girl. In England this year various venues are hosting events and exhibits (see “Long Live the King”) that commemorate Henry’s 38-year reign. Schwarz has organized the only such exhibit in the U.S.–a tribute to the power of an autodidact with a passion for primary sources and original manuscripts.

Schwarz dates his mania to 1978, when he was sent to London to open a bond operation for Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. A visit to Westminster Abbey was an epiphany. “You walk into that building and suddenly you’re surrounded by 900 years of history,” he exclaims. Schwarz soon discovered that for only a few hundred dollars he could own a piece of it. His first purchase: John Stow’s Survey of London, a sixth edition of a text originally produced in 1598, with 132 engraved plates. Bought for $500, it might now fetch $5,000. Since then Schwarz has accumulated roughly 250 books and manuscripts with an emphasis on the Tudors, English royalty and the history of London. No stunners in the collection, though rarer pieces have increased in value, like a history of St. Paul’s cathedral published in 1658 that Schwarz bought for $8,800 in 1982 and is now worth around $35,000, confirms New York antiquarian-book dealer James Cummins. (His copy is especially valuable since it once belonged to Sir Christopher Wren, the esteemed architect who designed a replacement cathedral after St. Paul’s was gutted by the Great Fire of London in 1666.) To be sure, Schwarz would have done a lot better in the stock market.

The Schwarz collection would hardly cause a flutter at New York City’s Morgan Library or the Folger (among its 250,000-plus books, it owns 79 of the 242 surviving copies of the 1623 Shakespeare First Folio). But Schwarz appreciates leverage. In 2002 he found himself at a Grolier Club lunch, seated next to Werner Gundersheimer, then the Folger’s director. “I said, ‘Why don’t we put on a show together?’” Schwarz recalls. Gundersheimer agreed. Schwarz soon won over another institution with big Tudor holdings, Harvard’s Houghton Library. Next the Morgan Library volunteered to contribute to the show. Schwarz was in heaven: Suddenly he had access to thousands of precious books and manuscripts on his favorite subject.

What Schwarz didn’t quite realize then was that he was facing six years of near-nonstop toil. That included raising $120,000–from foundations,
Sotheby’s
, a passel of individuals, plus multiple grants–and dealing with myriad insurance companies and five additional lenders of material. One lender insisted its materials be the last inserted into display cases and the first taken out. Among his more beloved labors: crafting a meticulously researched, beautifully designed catalog for the show, with essays by three Tudor scholars, including John Guy of the University of Cambridge. Schwarz himself wrote the introductions to the show’s 11 parts and the descriptions of all 140 items.

The Grolier show traces Henry’s spectacular life from his birth in 1491 to his death in 1547. While remembered as the portly, bejeweled peacock depicted in court artist Hans Holbein’s 1537 portrait, Henry stood 6-feet-2 and as a young man had a lean, athletic frame and a verve for competitive sports like jousting and tennis. He received a classical education that included five languages, literature and philosophy. Among the items in the show is Henry’s schoolboy copy of Cicero, with an inscription by the young prince: “Thys Boke Is Myne Prynce Henry.”

Possessiveness and power guided his career. Early in his reign, while still married to his brother’s widow, Catherine of Aragon, Henry demonstrated serious theological interests, illustrated in the show by his 1521 defense of the seven sacraments, which he wrote in Latin, probably after getting help from his advisers, Cardinal Wolsey and Sir Thomas More (the one later stripped of his office, the other of his life). The piece attacks Luther as “this impious fellow” and “a little monk.”

Later, when it suited him, Henry changed his tune. Infatuated with Anne Boleyn, he renounced his ties with the Pope–the show has a copy of the astonishing declaration of independence, “This Realme of Englande is an Impire”–in order to secure a divorce from Catherine, who’d failed to produce a male heir. (Anne was beheaded in 1536, three years after giving birth to Elizabeth, later the queen of England for 45 years.) Evidence of Henry’s poor treatment of his first wife is highlighted in a 1531 letter from the queen to her nephew, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, in which she describes the “abominable litigation between the King my Lord and myself” and asserts that she “remained a maid and was a maid when [she] came unto the King.”

As Henry broke with Rome, expropriating and destroying church property, he also kicked up agricultural commerce. His aim was to dole out land to friends and political allies, but the result, says Fordham University professor Susan Wabuda, who contributed an essay to the catalog, was to encourage a growing circle of capitalists who expanded trade in products like wool with Belgium and the Netherlands. Henry also used the capital from plundered monasteries to fund his expensive wars in France and excessive lifestyle at court. A 1539 New Year’s Gift Roll details presents given and received by the king, including “a brase of greyhoundes” and “a night cap with cheynes & buttons of golde.”